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BFA Maryland Institute College of Art; MFA Washington University in St Louis

What is your creative specialty?

I have no creative specialty. I'm a professional dabbler! It's taken me awhile to see that as a strength.

When or how did you get interested in art?

I've been interested in art since I was very young. My mom would take me to museum classes and camps.

Did you always know you’d be an artist?

I always hoped I'd be an artist, though there were a few years where I doubted if it was the path for me and instead dedicated more time to creative writing. I didn't have many role models for what it meant to be a practicing artist, so the possibilities for sustaining myself as an artist have at times felt vague in the past. However, even during the years when I didn't make art, I always had a creative pursuit. For a while, that was cooking.

What’s your favorite thing about teaching?

My favorite thing about teaching is learning! By preparing assignments for students, I'm required to look deeper into techniques, histories, and materials that I may not have felt the need to for my own art practice.

Where do you find creative inspiration?

I find creative inspiration in travel and seeing how other people live. I become fascinated with various traditions, stories, techniques and objects from around the world.

What was the last thing you read for fun?

The last books I read for fun were Swing Time by Zadie Smith and Catherine McKinley's Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World. The former is fiction and the latter nonfiction. McKinley's book recounts her intense search for indigo around West Africa during her time as a Fulbright Fellow. I was reading the books at the same time, both narrated by mixed women who travel to West Africa while I was planning a trip to Ghana myself.

Any guilty pleasures?

My guilty pleasure lately has been Velvet, a Spanish TV series on Netflix, mostly a "guilty" pleasure because as the seasons progress, the show devolves from a well-written drama into something closer to a soap opera. I watch it to become more accustomed to hearing Spanish. Sometimes I watch it with Spanish (rather than English).